Politics is a contest about leadership and general values. Is government good or bad? Policy debate engages a much smaller group of experts and interest groups, and is usually incremental.
 
Almost no one talks about system failure. That’s too hard to fix, at least within the confines of the Washington establishment. But history shows that meaningful change is usually the result of system failure and dramatic overhaul. “Punctuated equilibrium” is the name political scientists give these tectonic shifts.

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Common Good Chair Philip Howard spent last week in Washington, and was impressed by the staffers and experts who saw clearly the need to 1) give permits to rebuild decrepit infrastructure and 2) remove managerial shackles that make it impossible to fix broken schools, fire rogue cops, and point government in the direction of what society needs. But they acknowledge none of that can happen. The status quo is defended by armies of special interests—public employee unions control government operations, environmental groups command a veto over all infrastructure, rich investors keep their tax breaks, and so forth.

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The American experiment is built on the powerful engine of individual initiative. Let people follow their star, and let other people make judgments about how they do. As Tocqueville observed: “No sooner do you set foot upon the American soil than you are stunned by a kind of tumult; a confused clamor is heard on every side; and a thousand simultaneous voices demand the immediate satisfaction of their social wants.”
 
The July 4th holiday is an opportunity to reflect on how we’re doing.

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Voters don’t seem excited by the prospect of a Biden-Trump rematch. There’s talk of a third party, but the initiative furthest along, No Labels, hasn’t put forth a candidate or a platform. Most chatter focuses on Republicans who might challenge Trump, but none poll anywhere close to him.

What would happen if candidates presented concrete visions of how to change how Washington works? Two-thirds of Americans support major overhaul. Candidates who present competing visions for remaking Washington might dislodge voter cynicism and stir up excitement.

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It sometimes feels like we’re carried by the current, floating past events that we know affect us but are beyond our control—at the southern border, say, or with the budget showdown in Congress. We look to our elected leaders to handle these things.
 
Instead of making tough choices, our leaders prefer to join us on the raft. Solving the budget crisis, for example, requires dealing with the pervasive waste in federal programs that GAO regularly reports on.

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Those who “underestimated the political power of the [public employee] unions … were mistaken.” That’s the conclusion of a New York Times Magazine cover story on teachers union leader Randi Weingarten. Union power and money were largely responsible for the recent election of Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, a prominent union leader. Public union power caused former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to call Weingarten “the most dangerous person in the world.”

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The pace of modern life is often dizzying, in almost all areas of human endeavor. Astonishing advances in science and technology rush towards the future alongside global threats of war, pandemic, climate change, and scarcity.

But there’s been almost no focus on how things work on the ground. Modernizing infrastructure, fixing lousy schools, reducing red tape in healthcare, and cutting waste in government are largely matters of execution, not policy.

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